Delivery-Date: Thu, 13 Jul 1995 12:50:53 -0700
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 1995 12:51:51 -0700
From: agu@nearinc.com (agu)
Message-Id: <9507131951.AA28217@cuba.nearinc.com>
To: haining@cse.ucsc.edu, ian@cse.ucsc.edu, urban@odi.com
Subject: grilling

 Nuclear Picnic
 by Dave Barry
 The Boston Globe Magazine June 25, 1995

 Today's culinary topic is: how to light a charcoal fire. Everybody
loves a backyard barbecue. For some reason, food just seems to taste
better when it has been cooked outdoors, where flies can lay eggs on
it.  But there's nothing worse than trying to set fire to a pile of
balky charcoal. The average back-yard chef, wishing to cook
hamburgers, tries to ignite the charcoal via the squirt, light, and
wait method, wherein you squirt lighter fluid on a pile of briquettes,
light the pile, then wait until they have turned a uniform gray color.
When I say "they have turned a uniform gray color," I am referring to
the hamburgers.  The briquettes will remain as cold and lifeless as
Leonard Nimoy.  The backyard chef will keep this up - squirting,
lighting, waiting; squirting, lighting, waiting - until the bacterial
level in the side dishes has reached the point where the potato salad
rises up from its bowl, Bloblike, and attempts to mate with the
corn. This is the signal that it's time to order Chinese food.

 The problem is that modern charcoal, manufactured under strict
consumer-safety guidelines, is one of the least flammable substances
on Earth.  On more than one occasion, quick-thinking individuals have
extinguished a raging house fire by throwing charcoal on it.  Your
backyard chef would be just as successful trying to ignite a pile of
rocks.

 Is there a solution?  Yes.  There happens to be a technique
that is guaranteed to get your charcoal burning very, very quickly,
although you should not attempt this technique unless you meet the
following criterion: You are a complete idiot. I found out about this
technique from alert reader George Rasko, who sent me a letter
describing something he came across on the World Wide Web, a computer
network that you should definitely learn more about, because as you
read these words, your 11-year-old is downloading pornography from
it. By hooking into the World Wide Web, you can look at a variety of
electronic "pages," consisting of documents, pictures, and videos
created by people all over the world.  One of these is a guy named
(really) George Goble, a computer person in the Purdue University
engineering department. Each year, Goble and a bunch of other
engineers hold a picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at which they cook
hamburgers on a big grill.  Being engineers, they began looking for
practical ways to speed up the charcoal-lighting process. "We started
by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told me in a
telephone interview.  "Then we figured out that it would light faster
if we used a vacuum cleaner."

 If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general, you
know what happened: The purpose of the charcoal-lighting shifted from
cooking hamburgers to seeing how fast they could light the
charcoal. From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane
torch, then an acetylene torch.  Then Goble started using compressed
pure oxygen, which caused the charcoal to burn much faster, because as
you recall from chemistry class, fire is essentially the rapid
combination of oxygen with the cosine to form the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers (or something along those lines).

By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times.  But in the world
of competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not cut the
mustard. Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using - get ready - liquid
oxygen.  This is the form of oxygen used in rocket engines; it's 295
degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as regular oxygen.  In terms
of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen on charcoal is the
equivalent of throwing a live squirrel into a room containing 50
million Labrador retrievers.  On Gobel's World Wide Web page (the
address is http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/), you can see actual photographs
and a video of Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden
handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in stores) onto a
grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for
ignition. What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have
ever seen, featuring a large fireball that, acc ording to Goble,
reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  The charcoal was ready for cooking
in - this has to be a world record - 3 seconds. There's also a photo
of what happened when Goble used the same technique on a flimsy $2.88
discount-store grill.  All that's left is a circle of charcoal with a
few shreds of metal in it.  "Basically, the grill vaporized," said
Goble.  "We were thinking of returning it to the store for a refund."

Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all
choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near
the engineers' picnic site.  But also, I was proud of my country for
producing guys who can be ready to barbecue in less time than it takes
for guys in less-advanced nations, such as France, to spit. Will the
3-second barrier ever be broken?  Will engineers come up with a new,
more powerful charcoal-lighting technology?  It's something for all of